The Great God Pan
()
About this ebook
Arthur Machen
Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was a Welsh author and actor best known for his fantasy and horror fiction. He grew up with intentions of becoming a doctor, but followed a boyhood passion of the supernatural and occult and started to write. In 1890, Machen began publishing short stories in literary magazines. Four years later, he released his breakthrough work, The Great God Pan. Decried upon initial publication for its depictions of sex and violence, the tale has since become a horror classic and has been hailed as “maybe the best [horror story] in the English language” by Stephen King. Machen continued to publish supernatural novels but spent time as actor in a traveling player company after his wife’s death. His literary career revived once more with the publication of his works The House of Souls and The Hill of Dreams. During World War I, Machen became a full-time journalist. Though he rallied for republications of his works, Machen’s literary career ultimately diminished, and he lived much of his life in poor finances.
Read more from Arthur Machen
The Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult: Hidden Magic, Occult Truths, and the Stories That Started It All Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Novel of the Black Seal Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Five Gothic Masterpieces: The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Great God Pan, Frankenstein, Carmilla, and Dracula Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Greatest Ghost and Horror Stories Ever Written: volume 4 (30 short stories) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Greatest Ghost and Horror Stories Ever Written: volume 1 (30 short stories) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Famous Modern Ghost Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Arthur Machen MEGAPACK ®: 25 Classic Works Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGothic Classics: 60+ Books in One Volume Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings50 Halloween Stories you have to read before you die (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Novel of the White Powder Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Arthur Machen Collection Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Book of Shadows Vol 2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings50 Horror masterpieces you have to read before you die [newly updated] (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTales of Horror and the Supernatural Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hill of Dreams: Autobiographical Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hill of Dreams (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5TRICK OR TREAT Boxed Set: 200+ Eerie Tales from the Greatest Storytellers: Horror Classics, Mysterious Cases, Gothic Novels, Monster Tales & Supernatural Stories: Sweeney Todd, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Frankenstein, The Vampire, Dracula, Sleepy Hollow, From Beyond… Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThree Imposters and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to The Great God Pan
Related ebooks
THE GREAT GOD PAN (Horror Classic) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThree Imposters and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Most Dangerous Game: Richard Connell's Original Masterpiece Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThree Sixes and a Forked Tongue or Cold Medicine and a Liar Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Japanese Fairy Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Willows Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOsgood Riddance: A Spectral Inspector Novel: The Spectral Inspector, #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAll Through the House and Other Tales from a Random Place Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnomalies and Curiosities of Medicine Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Hours of Creeping Night: A collection of dark speculative short fiction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBorn with the Dead Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Neverest Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOrlando: A Biography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nightmare Magazine, Issue 133 (October 2023): Nightmare Magazine, #133 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSomething From Below Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsH.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Flock of Ba-Hui and Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHouse on Fire Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFear and Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ghastling: Book Nine Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Tea and Other Tales Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGrim Fairy Tales for Adults Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSupernatural Sherlocks Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hell! Said the Duchess Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sorrows of Satan (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Whisper In The Dark Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFifty-Ones Tales Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGhost Stories of an Antiquary Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Classics For You
The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things They Carried Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Little Women (Seasons Edition -- Winter) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master and Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebecca Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Animal Farm: A Fairy Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Count of Monte Cristo (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learn French! Apprends l'Anglais! THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: In French and English Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Grapes of Wrath Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mythos Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Have Always Lived in the Castle Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Jungle: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Count of Monte-Cristo English and French Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ulysses: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sense and Sensibility (Centaur Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The End of the Affair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Great God Pan
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Great God Pan - Arthur Machen
The Great God Pan
I: The Experiment
I am glad you came, Clarke; very glad indeed. I was not sure you could spare the time.
I was able to make arrangements for a few days; things are not very lively just now. But have you no misgivings, Raymond? Is it absolutely safe?
The two men were slowly pacing the terrace in front of Dr. Raymond’s house. The sun still hung above the western mountain-line, but it shone with a dull red glow that cast no shadows, and all the air was quiet; a sweet breath came from the great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, the soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, in the long lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely hills, and, as the sun hovered and vanished into the west, a faint mist, pure white, began to rise from the hills. Dr. Raymond turned sharply to his friend.
Safe? Of course it is. In itself the operation is a perfectly simple one; any surgeon could do it.
And there is no danger at any other stage?
None; absolutely no physical danger whatsoever, I give you my word. You are always timid, Clarke, always; but you know my history. I have devoted myself to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and impostor, but all the while I knew I was on the right path. Five years ago I reached the goal, and since then every day has been a preparation for what we shall do tonight.
I should like to believe it is all true.
Clarke knit his brows, and looked doubtfully at Dr. Raymond. Are you perfectly sure, Raymond, that your theory is not a phantasmagoria—a splendid vision, certainly, but a mere vision after all?
Dr. Raymond stopped in his walk and turned sharply. He was a middle-aged man, gaunt and thin, of a pale yellow complexion, but as he answered Clarke and faced him, there was a flush on his cheek.
Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things—yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career,’ beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another’s eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.
Clarke shivered; the white mist gathering over the river was chilly.
It is wonderful indeed,
he said. We are standing on the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the knife is absolutely necessary?
"Yes; a slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all; a trifling rearrangement of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would escape the attention of ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred. I don’t want to bother you with ‘shop,’ Clarke; I might give you a mass of technical detail which would sound very imposing, and would leave you as enlightened as you are now. But I suppose you have read, casually, in out-of-the-way corners of your paper, that immense strides have been made recently in the physiology of the brain. I saw a paragraph the other day about Digby’s theory, and Browne Faber’s discoveries. Theories and discoveries! Where they are standing now, I stood fifteen years ago, and I need not tell you that I have not been standing still for the last fifteen years. It will be enough if I say that five years ago I made the discovery that I alluded to when I said that ten years ago I reached the goal. After years of labour, after years of toiling and groping in the dark, after days and nights of disappointments and sometimes of despair, in which I used now and then to tremble and grow cold with the thought that perhaps there were others seeking for what I sought, at last, after so long, a pang of sudden joy thrilled my soul, and I knew the long journey was at an end. By what seemed then and still seems a chance, the suggestion of a moment’s idle thought followed up upon familiar lines and paths that I had tracked a hundred times already, the great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans in which no ship has sailed (to my belief) since a Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath. You will think this all high-flown language, Clarke, but it is hard to be literal. And yet; I do not know whether what I am hinting at cannot be set forth in plain and lonely terms. For instance, this world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph wires and cables; thought, with something less than the speed of thought, flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south, across the floods and the desert places. Suppose that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uttermost space lie open before the current, and words of men flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the systems beyond, and the voice of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought. As analogies go, that is a pretty good analogy of what I have done; you can understand now a little of what I felt as I stood here one evening; it was a summer evening, and the